african-american

Fifteen years in, our twenty-first century literary traditions are beginning to take shape, and, indeed, it may be time to bring the poorly-named "contemporary" period to a close after its 70-year reign. Questions remain, however. Have we noticeably shifted into a new literary period? Or, is the defining crisis that will launch a new literary period just on the horizon? The 9-11 Attacks, globalization/neoliberalism, the Anthropocene, the collapse of a post-Cold War détente with the resultant repolarization of world powers and many other cultural shifts may serve as useful markers of an incipient yet-to-be-labeled era.

We are constantly under pressure to define the "now." When did it begin? What does it include? When will it end? Recent attempts to capture this moving target have offered an array of starting points--the end of World War II, 1968, the end of the Cold War, the start of the new millennium, 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis. These attempts have also offered an array of periodizing concepts--postmodernism, post-postmodernism, late capitalism, neoliberalism, the anthropocene, the post-civil rights era, the post-human. We propose to respond to and circumvent this pressure in two ways. First, by creating a dialogue between our periodizing concerns and recent literature and art.

Exploring Moral Interfaces: Private Worlds and Public Systems An International Conference organized by The English and Foreign Languages University 7th to 9th October, 2015 "Everyone deserves a private life," says the female protagonist in the 1994 movie, Three Colors: Red by Krzysztof Kieślowski. The intrusive nature of the modern technologies that facilitate access—without consent or acknowledgement—to the private domains of people's lives further blurs the already hazy borderlines that separate the public from the private. The proposed conference will address some of the troubling issues relating to this phenomenon.

The Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) is calling for papers for its 113th annual convention. This session welcomes submissions on papers on any topic in American Literature after 1865. Please submit a 500 word proposal, a 50 word abstract, and your paper title to our online proposal system (http://www.pamla.org/2015/proposals) by May 15, 2015. Also, please specify if you need AV equipment.

For all its many urban topographies, the literary landscape of modernism contains a startling array of greens. From William Carlos Williams's representations of Garret Mountain Park, to Peter's reflections on Mrs. Dalloway in Regents Park or Wallace Stevens' frequent use of Elizabeth Park throughout his oeuvre, planned green spaces play an overlooked role in the development of modernism. We propose that thinking with and through public greens leads to a fresh and often more complex understanding of modernism's tangled engagements with arts, politics, material culture, bodies, and the nature-culture divide.

Poetry has been a continuous presence in the realm of philosophy. While the conflation often engendered poetic synchronization to the epistemic and aesthetic concerns of philosophy the cross-currents also opened up interesting instances of dissent. The resultant proliferation of ideas gave impetus to 'other' readings of poetry parallel to its traditional nuance. This volume seeks scholarly and original essays that take into account philosophy's engagement with poetry that goes back to Plato and Aristotle, and is a continuing imperative in the philosophical paradigms of Kant, Hegel, Rousseau, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Jean-Luc Nancy, Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer, Bakhtin, Heidegger, Sartre, Blanchot, Derrida, Adorno, Agamben and others.

Kinships that cross boundaries often entail radical decenterings of family, community, or subjectivity. What happens when Yellow Peril supports Black Power in Ferguson? When Maggie Simpson holds up a Je Suis Charlie sign? When, in a single frame, Kordale and Kaleb dismantle stale notions of Black masculinity, queerness, and fatherhood?